Hitman devs show off new engine tech in 007 First Light including new real-time global illumination and software ray-tracing

The devs behind 007 First Light uncovered several new engine upgrades that are being implemented into their upcoming James Bond game. In a video by Digital Foundry, DF's Alex Battaglia sat down with six developers from IO Interactive discussing 007 First Light's graphical upgrades and performance. Some of these features include a new real-time global illumination system, dynamic asset streaming, and a software-based ray tracing solution that is highly optimized and scalable across multiple platforms.

The lighting system in 007 First Light has been significantly upgraded since the engine was used with Hitman 3. IO Interactive has developed a new ray-traced real-time global illumination system that takes advantage of a screen space component to adjust lighting on a per-pixel basis, with a probe-based solution serving as a fallback. By contrast, the Hitman games used an inferior static solution using box reflections.

The ray-tracing system 007 First Light is using is a proprietary software-based solution that does not take advantage of RT cores on NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel GPUs. Despite this, IO Interactive states its RT solution is very well optimized and is not lacking in capability. The switch from hardware-acceleration to software is aimed at providing better scalability across a broad range of platforms. Having one ray-tracing solution for the engine simplifies the rendering pipeline, making the engine run better on various hardware and reducing development time on the development side. IO Interactive also revealed that the ray-tracing pipeline has been almost entirely rewritten to take better advantage of GPU resources.

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The only exception to 007 First Light's software-based solution is the inclusion of path-tracing. 007 First Light will support the feature. Not much was said on how PT was implemented, but the devs did state that they want path tracing in the game, for development purposes not just for gamers.

For asset streaming, IO Interactive has moved onto a fully dynamic version of its "Bricks" streaming system. Initially conceived in the Hitman games, a "brick" represents layers in a scene; one such layer might only include raw geometry, and then another layer might be built on top of the first layer with assets such as tables, chairs, lights, etc. Bricks essentially represent the game world and what's included in each level in-game. With the Hitman games, this system was completely static, but for 007 First Light, the developers had to develop a streaming model that could stream bricks in and out on-the-fly while maintaining good performance. The devs state this was very difficult to do, and noted they forced themselves to a strict 2ms budget on the main CPU thread to ensure the system would not bottleneck the game and initiate stuttering. Having a system like this was critical to make levels on the scope and scale required for the game.

IO Interactive also discussed 007 First Light's new volumetric system dubbed "Smolder". This system is designed to provide volumetric effects that can be placed anywhere in a scene and adapt to the lighting conditions it is placed in, in real-time. This is specifically applicable to shadows, where volumetric effects such as fog or smoke generate their own shadows based on the lighting around them.

The devs also discussed performance optimizations with the game, noting that a 60 FPS requirement was the target goal from the very beginning of development. Work was done to take full advantage of asynchronous compute and code all of the game's computationally expensive technologies off of the main CPU thread. Thanks to this, the game allegedly runs well above 60 FPS on the CPU with the latest consoles, ensuring that the game will be able to achieve a solid 60 FPS as much as possible without fluctuations.

007 First Light launches next week on the 27th, and is available for pre-order now for $69.99. The game's minimum specifications include a Ryzen 5 3500 and GTX 1660, suggesting the game will be easy to run compared to other AAA games that run on Unreal Engine 5.